The Data-Centric Approach to Data Privacy

All organizations understand how critical it is to have access to their customers’ and prospects’ sensitive personal data. This intelligence is essential to helping them create and maintain relationships so they can deliver tailored experiences and recommendations. Having this sensitive personal data also facilitates the streamlined execution of basic business transactions.

The digitalization of business has been the catalyst for this phenomenon; enabling consumers to leverage the most transformative innovations of the modern era to facilitate entertainment, education, knowledge, social sharing, and shopping. Consumers are, for the most part, willing to trade information about themselves to get what they perceive as equal value in return.

The downside of this agreement for enterprises and consumers is the constant threat of a data breach in which cybercriminals steal consumers’ sensitive personal data. Every day, enterprises must contend with the challenges of a growing threat landscape and more sophisticated threat vectors. Once bad actors create a breach, they can leverage the sensitive data they steal for a myriad of crimes such as extortion, fraud, or selling that data on the dark web.

In spite of this constant threat, enterprises continue to collect and manage sensitive personal data. Meanwhile, these enterprises continue to be accountable to data compliance audits. In this post, we’ll explain why sensitive personal data is so difficult to secure, and suggest what a data privacy solution should offer to the modern enterprise.

The evolving privacy regulation landscape

There are currently several regulations and frameworks on the books in various countries and states or provinces worldwide that govern data protection law. The goal of these laws is to hold organizations accountable for data privacy and give consumers more control over how their personal data is managed and used. Regardless of what your organization does, if you retain sensitive personal data you are accountable to protect it. The cost of non-compliance is more and longer resource-intensive audits, penalties, fines, and damage to brand reputation.

A sensitive personal data management gap

To get a sense for how wide the sensitive personal data management gap is in your organization, ask the following questions:

• What sensitive personal data do you hold?
• Where do you keep sensitive personal data?
• Who has access privileges to the sensitive personal data?
• How are you protecting sensitive personal data now?
• Are we using sensitive personal data appropriately?

If you cannot provide sufficient answers, you have a sensitive data management gap to address, and you are not alone. 54% of companies have reported not knowing where their sensitive data is stored. Furthermore, 65% say they’ve collected so much data that they’re unable to categorize or analyze it. What can you do to identify and classify sensitive personal data without imposing an undue burden on their budget?

Imperva Data Privacy: The data-centric solution

You must gain complete visibility into your data repositories. Imperva Data Privacy enables complete and automatic visibility through a single UI into all data and user activity at the database level. This solution eliminates concerns about DevOps teams or DBAs spinning up databases with no warning and old databases holding sensitive personal data that are no longer used yet are still part of the estate. Discovering and classifying sensitive personal data in both structured and unstructured data sources, on-premise or in the cloud, becomes much easier and faster. The solution constantly scans your data repositories looking for sensitive personal data so you can protect it. Achieving this level of visibility is also key to effectively automating the fulfillment of subject rights requests.

Effective rights and risks assessment

Imperva Data Privacy enables complete visibility into current user entitlements across your entire data estate so you can easily assess and effectively streamline privileged user policies.

Complying with consumer right requests

The Imperva Data Privacy enables organizations to fulfill subject rights requests in a reasonable timeframe without being a burden on resources.

Achieve 360° visibility and control

The Imperva solution constantly collects, normalizes, and stores data to create an audit trail that informs who is accessing it, when, and from where. From a single dashboard, all stakeholders can automatically filter on any data type, in any combination, in a matter of seconds for reporting or live investigation. This makes the entire team more efficient at fulfilling their responsibilities within the privacy management lifecycle.

Protect, respond and remediate

Imperva Data Privacy provides tools that protect sensitive personal data and prevent a breach. The solution continuously and automatically identifies inappropriate or risky data access behavior across all data repositories, notifying you of policy violations or developing threats so you can correct it before it becomes an incident. You get plain-language descriptions of what happened – who did it, when, and what data was accessed. In addition, you gain live access to audit data to expedite real-time forensic-level investigation into the details of any security incident.

Imperva Data Privacy expert Terry Ray explains it all

Privacy and security have a high degree of overlap when it comes to protecting data. In this on-demand webinar, hear Imperva Fellow Terry Ray explain the data-associated requirements common to many new privacy laws and the steps you need to take to meet those privacy requirements, including:

• Recognizing the types of data that must be managed
• Identifying and cataloging data to prove compliance
• Finding combinations of data with correlated attributes, irrelevant by themselves, that become privacy sensitive when joined together
• Tips for compliance requirements-driven moving, tracking, and protecting data

Watch the webinar now.